Welcome to WOW2!
WOW2 is a twice-monthly sister blog to This Week in the War on Women. This edition covers women and events from November 1 through November 10.
This is an on-going, evolving project. So many women have been added to the lists over the past four years that even changing the posts from monthly to twice a month, the pages have kept getting longer and more unwieldy – an astonishing and wonderful problem to have!
Since I’ve actually broken the data limit on individual diaries, I’m now splitting WOW2 into three posts. But November is Native American Heritage Month, no matter what Trump is trying to call it, and there will be a Special Edition of Native American Women on Saturday, November 16. Then on Saturday, November 23, the Mid-November Edition will post, followed by Late November Edition on Saturday, November 30.
For the entire previous EARLY NOVEMBER list as of 2018, click HERE: www.dailykos.com/...
Otherwise, what you’re seeing on this Early November 2019 page are the NEW people and events, or additional information, images and audibles, found since last year.
This Week in the War on Women
just posted, so be sure to go there next to catch
up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines:
www.dailykos.com/...
Many thanks to libera nos, intrepid Assistant Editor of WOW2. Any remaining mistakes are either mine, or uncaught computer glitches in transferring the data from his emails to DK5. And much thanks to wow2lib, WOW2’s wonderful Librarian Emeritus.
The purpose of WOW2 is to learn about and honor women of achievement, including many who’ve been ignored or marginalized in most of the history books, and to mark moments in women’s history. It also serves as a reference archive of women’s history. There are so many more phenomenal women than I ever dreamed of finding, and all too often their stories are almost unknown, even to feminists and scholars.
These trailblazers have a lot to teach us about persistence in the face of overwhelming odds. I hope you will find reclaiming our past as much of an inspiration as I do.
This Week in the War on Women will post soon, so be sure to go there next and catch up on the latest dispatches from the frontlines.
Early November's Women Trailblazers and Events in Our History
Note: All images and audios are below the person or event to which they refer
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- November 1, 1148 – Empress Matilda’s disputed reign (1141-1148) as ‘Lady of the English’ ends as Stephen of Blois retakes the throne of England. She had been married at an early age to Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, but they had no children, and he died in 1125. After her only brother’s death in 1120, she was nominated by her father King Henry I of England as his heir, making his court swear an oath of loyalty to her and her successors, but this was not popular in the Anglo-Norman court. When Henry died in 1135, she was opposed by the barons, and her cousin Stephen of Blois took the throne. After four years with her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, in Anjou and Normandy, she crossed the channel to take the kingdom by force, but the power shifted back and forth battle by battle, and she was never able to fully reign. After Stephen took back the throne in 1148, she returned to Normandy, leaving her eldest son to continue the campaign – he would succeed to the throne as Henry II in 1154. For the rest of her life, she concerned herself with the administration of Normandy, acting on behalf of her son, and founding Cistercian monasteries.
- November 1, 1526 – Catherine Jagiellon born, Polish princess who married John III of Sweden, becoming Queen consort of Sweden (1569-1583), and Grand Princess of Finland. She had significant influence over state affairs during the reign of John III. As a Catholic queen in a Protestant nation, she negotiated with the Vatican over a counter-reformation in Sweden, but was unable to persuade either the Pope or the Swedish Protestants to make enough concessions for a workable compromise.
- November 1, 1848 – New England Female Medical School, the first medical school for women, opens. It will merge in 1874 with Boston University School of Medicine, becoming one of the first co-educational medical schools.
- November 1, 1848 – Caroline Still Anderson born, African-American physician, educator and social activist. She was one of the first American black women to become a doctor, and was a pioneering physician in Philadelphia’s black community. Her parents were both leaders in the abolitionist movement – her father was the head of the Philadelphia branch of the Underground Railroad. She attended the Institute for Colored Youth, then went to Oberlin College, where she was the only black student in her class, and the youngest graduate of her year, earning her degree at 19. She was elected as the first black president of the Ladies’ Literary Society of Oberlin. Still Anderson married her first husband in 1869, but he died in 1875. Two years later, she completed her studies at Howard University College of Medicine, then earned her Doctor of Medicine degree at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1878, one of only two black students. In 1878 she applied for an internship at Boston's New England Hospital for Women and Children, but her initial application was rejected by the hospital board because of her race. However, after she met with the board in person, they appointed her to the internship by a unanimous vote. When her internship ended in 1879, she moved back to Philadelphia, opened a dispensary and founded a private practice. She married again, this time to a minister, Matthew Anderson. With Anderson, she co-founded the Berean Manual Training and Industrial School, a vocational and liberal arts institution, where she taught classes and acted as assistant principle. Her busy career ended in 1914, when she suffered a paralytic stroke. In her later years, she worked with several Philadelphia organizations, including the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a group opening YMCAs for black men, and she was on the board of the Home for Aged and Infirm Colored People of Philadelphia. She died in 1919, at the age of 70, after suffering additional strokes.
- November 1, 1889 – Hannah Höch born, German Dada artist, painter and pioneer in photomontage; notable for works exploring changing gender roles, androgyny and political discourse in the years between WWI and WWII.
- November 1, 1896 – A picture showing the bare breasts of a woman appears in National Geographic magazine for the first time.
- November 1, 1898 – Sippie Wallace born, American blues singer-songwriter, called “The Texas Nightingale.” She made recordings for Okeh records with her brother George, and with a young Louis Armstrong. She retired from show business in the 1930s, and became a church organist, until her friend Victoria Spivey, who had founded her own record label, coaxed her out of retirement. Wallace toured folk and blues festivals and recorded two albums, Women Be Wise, and Sings the Blues, in 1966, which brought her to the attention of Bonnie Raitt. They made recordings and toured together in the 1970s and 1980s, but Wallace also continued her solo career. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1983. After a concert at a jazz festival in Germany in 1986, she suffered a severe stroke, and returned to the U.S., where she died on her 88th birthday that year.
- November 1, 1915 – Margaret Taylor-Burroughs born, American painter and poet; co-founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History.
- November 1, 1917 – Zenna Henderson born, American science fiction and fantasy author; nominated for a Hugo Award in 1959 for her novelette Captivity; unlike many other women authors of science fiction at the time, she never used a male pseudonym.
- November 1, 1938 – Nicholasa Mohr born in New York of Puerto Rican parents, one of the few Latina women authors in the 20th century to be published by major commercial publishing houses; her first book, Nilda (1973), which she also illustrated, won the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award; her second book, El Bronx Remembered was published by Harper & Row in 1975, and she became the first Latina woman to win the New York Outstanding Book Award.
- November 1, 1938 – Emily England Clyburn born, librarian and longtime wife of South Carolina’s U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn. She was a public school librarian in Columbia and Charleston, then spent 29 years as a medical librarian at the Charleston Naval Base and Dorn VA Medical Center in Columbia. She and Clyburn met during college at a courthouse, after he had been arrested with several others for staging sit-in protests against segregated businesses. The protesters had not been fed at the jail, and when she heard him say how hungry he was, she bought a hamburger and split it with him. They were married a year later, and celebrated their 58th wedding anniversary in June before she died in September, 2019. In his memoirs, Jim Clyburn gave his wife much credit for being the motivator behind his political career, and the person he asked for advice on his most vexing decisions in Washington. The two of them raised millions of dollars for scholarships to their alma mater, South Carolina State University.
- November 1, 1946 – Yuko Shimizu (清水 侑子 Shimizu Yūko) born, Japanese designer; creator of Hello Kitty and Angel Cat Sugar.
- November 1, 1949 – The U.S. Department of Commerce declares Author’s Day an official national day. First proposed in 1928 as a tribute to American Authors by schoolteacher Nellie Verne Burt McPherson to members of the Bement Illinois Women’s Club, and the General Federation of Women’s Clubs.
- November 1, 1953 – Jan Davis born, American astronaut and aerospace engineer; first worked for NASA at the Marshall Space Flight Center as an engineer, then named team leader in the Structural Analysis Division in 1986, where she worked on the Hubble Space Telescope; she became an astronaut in 1987, assigned to the Astronaut Office Mission Development Branch, then handled communications with Shuttle crews at Mission Control, and flew on three space shuttle missions, logging over 673 hours in space between 1992 and 1997.
- November 1, 1959 – Susanna Clarke born, English author, her first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, won a Hugo Award; also noted for her short story collection, The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories.
- November 1, 1961 – Louise Boije of Gennäs born, Swedish feminist writer; noted for best-selling semi-autobiographical novel, Stjärnor utan svindel (Stars Without Vertigo).
- November 1, 1964 – Nita Ambani born, influential Indian businesswoman and philanthropist; co-founder and chair of Reliance Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in India, which sponsors Braille materials for the blind and a cornea transplant program, among several other programs.
- November 1, 1967 – Carla van de Puttelaar born, Dutch fine art photographer, noted for portraits and nude studies.
- November 1, 1972 – Toni Collett born, Australian actress, singer-songwriter and producer; noted for her performances in Muriel’s Wedding, The Sixth Sense, About a Boy, In Her Shoes, and Little Miss Sunshine. In 2017, she formed Vocab Films with Jen Turner. She is an animal rights supporter, and has campaigned against the Australian sheep farm practice of mulesing, the removal of wool-bearing skin on sheep buttocks.
- November 1, 1978 – Helen Czerski born, English physicist and oceanographer; Research Fellow in the department of mechanical engineering at University College London; previously at the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton; much of her research focuses on ocean bubbles; regular presenter on science programs for the BBC, and has columns in BBC Focus magazine and the Wall Street Journal; author of Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life; won the 2018 Lord Kelvin Medal and Prize from the Institute of Physics.
- November 1, 2016 – Pope Francis said that the Catholic Church would probably never allow women to serve as priests. Pope John Paul II wrote in 1994 that Jesus chose only men as his apostles, and that, "The exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for his Church." Francis said the letter indicated that the ban would likely endure forever. The pope raised hopes of advocates for ordaining women when he created a commission earlier this year to study the possibility of women serving as deacons, who perform many of the functions of priests. Women served as deacons early in the church's history.
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- November 2, 1709 – Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange; second child of King George II of Great Britain, and was educated in languages – German, French and English, and was taught music by Georg Friedrich Händel. She married William IV, Prince of Orange, in 1734, and Handel composed music for the wedding. In 1747, William became Stadstholder of the Seven United Provinces, but he died at the age of 40 in 1751, and Anne was appointed as regent for her 3-year-old son, William V. She was hard-working but imperious, and unpopular with the Dutch, especially since she was the defender of the authority established in her husband’s reign of the central hereditary Stadtholder government over the traditional rights of the Dutch states. Her rule was resented, but her consolidation policy effectively secured the hereditary Stadtholder rule in the Netherlands for her son. She died at age 49 in 1759, and her mother-in-law, Marie Louise of Hesse-Kassel became regent. When Marie Louise died in 1765, Anne’s daughter Caroline became regent for her brother until he reached the age of 18 in 1766.
- November 2, 1879 – Marion Jones Farquhar born, American tennis player, first Californian to reach the finals at the Women’s U.S. Tennis Championships in 1898, but her first win is in 1899, her second win in 1902. At the 1900 Olympics, became the first American woman to win a medal in Tennis; inducted into International Tennis Hall of Fame in 2006. She lived in Greenwich Village (1920-1961), where she was well known as a violinist and voice coach. She also translated opera librettos and for a short time was head of the New York Chamber Opera.
- November 2, 1890 – Moa Martinson born, Swedish author of proletarian literature who portrayed conditions of the working class, especially the lives of working-class women. She started work at age 15, as a kitchen maid and apprentice pantry chef (responsible for refrigerated foods); her difficult first marriage, living in an area so isolated she gave birth to one of her sons alone on the kitchen floor, and the time’s economic hardships were vividly depicted in her semi-autobiographical books; Kvinnor och äppelträd (Women and Apple Trees), Kungens rosor (The King’s Roses), and Rågvakt (Rye Guard).
- November 2, 1905 – Isabella Smith Andrews born in Glasgow, Scotland; New Zealand writer, poet, playwright and screenwriter. Her family moved to New Zealand when she was five or six years old, and she attended Wellington Girls’ College. Andrews was a founding member of the New Zealand Women Writers and Artists Society in 1932. She won a radio competition in 1938 with her play Endeavour. She was married to Ernest Stanhope Andrews, a public servant who became the founding director of the National Film Unit in 1941. She became the founder and resident playwright of the Strathmore Players, and wrote some 60 plays, often one-acts, tailored for the small company and its limited financial resources. Her play, The Willing Horse, won the Drama League’s original play award, and was published in 1943, then reprinted in 1962. She also wrote some radio plays which were aired by the New Zealand Broadcasting Service, the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and the BBC.
- November 2, 1921 - Margaret Sanger's National Birth Control League combines with Mary Ware Denetts’ Voluntary Parenthood League to form the American Birth Control League, which later becomes Planned Parenthood.
- November 2, 1936 – Rose Elizabeth Bird born, first woman California Secretary of Agriculture, allowed workers to unionize, appointed Chief Justice of California Supreme Court in 1977, the only California justice not to be reconfirmed by voters in 1987 election, primarily because of her opposition to death penalty.
- November 2, 1939 – Pauline Neville-Jones born, career member of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service (1963-1996) in Rhodesia, Singapore, Washington DC and Bonn; seconded to the European Commission (1977-1982); 1991-1994, Head of Defence and Overseas Secretariat in the Cabinet Office and Deputy Secretary to the Cabinet; made a Dame Commander in 1995, and The Baroness Neville-Jones in 2007.
- November 2, 1942 – Shere Hite born in the U.S., became a German citizen in 1995; sexologist whose work focuses primarily on female sexuality.
- November 2, 1942 – Stefanie Powers born, American actress and wildlife conservationist; best known for the television series Hart to Hart (1979-1984), in which she co-starred with Robert Wagner. She is the director of the Mount Kenya Game Ranch and Wildlife Conservancy in Nanyuki, Kenya, and works with the Cincinnati Zoo and the Atlanta Zoo. Powers is an international campaigner and speaker for wildlife preservation.
- November 2, 1946 – Michelle Cliff born in Jamaica, Jamaican-American author, noted for Abeng, No Telephone to Heaven, Free Enterprise, and Into the Interior, which feature the complex identify problems of people in the post-colonial age, and also address racial, gender and sexual identity issues. Cliff was a lesbian and a feminist, whose partner was poet Adrienne Rich. She was an associate of the Women’s Institute for Freedom of the Press.
- November 2, 1949 – Lois McMaster Bujold born, American speculative fiction author; 4-time Hugo Award-winner; The Mountains of Mourning, The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls.
- November 2, 1961 – k.d. lang born, Canadian pop-country singer-songwriter, 4-time Grammy winner. Lang is also known for being an animal rights, LGBTQ rights, and Tibetan human rights activist.
- November 2, 1964 – Britta Lejon born, Swedish Social Democratic politician; member of the Riksdag, and in the cabinet of Göran Persson (1996-2006).
- November 2, 1974 – Sofia Polgár born, Hungarian chess player, the middle sister between Susan and Judit Polgár, all three Polgárs are Chess Grandmasters; Sofia was World Under-14 Girls Champion in 1986, her highest performance rating of 2879 came at a tournament in Rome; at one time she was ranked as the world’s sixth-strongest woman player.
- November 2, 1977 – Emma Reynolds born, British Labour Politician; Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton North East since 2010
- November 2, 1993 – U.S. Senate calls for full disclosure of Republican Senator Bob Packwood’s diaries in a sexual harassment probe. 18 women had come forward by 1992 saying he had sexually harassed them. The Senate Ethics Committee had to get a court order to enforce a subpoena for the voluminous diaries kept by Packwood. The inquiry went on behind closed doors until 1995. Barbara Boxer, Democratic Senator from California, started a floor fight that year over holding public hearings, but Republicans in the Senate blocked public hearings. Ultimately, the bi-partisan Ethics Committee report concluded, “Senator Packwood engaged in a pattern of abuse of his position of power and authority as a United States Senator by repeatedly committing sexual misconduct, making at least 18 separate unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances between 1969 and 1990. “In most of these instances, the victims were members of Senator Packwood’s staff or individuals whose livelihoods were dependent upon or connected to the power and authority held by Senator Packwood. These improper acts bring discredit and dishonor upon the Senate and constitute conduct unbecoming a United States Senator.” The Committee voted unanimously for expulsion, but Packwood resigned just before the full Senate would have voted to expel him.
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- November 3, 1793 – Olympe de Gouges, a French playwright, abolitionist and feminist, is guillotined for her opposition to the execution of Louis XVI, and a poster which demands a plebiscite so the people could choose between a unitary republic, a federalist government or a constitutional monarchy; she was the author of Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizeness), published in 1791.
- November 3, 1878 – Bangalore Nagarathnamma born; Indian singer, cultural and feminist activist, history scholar, patron of the arts and a third-generation courtesan. She was a Carnatic singer, a vocal musical tradition of southern India, one of the two main subgenres of Indian classical music. She built a temple over the Samadhi of the Carnatic singer Tyagaraja at Thiruvaiyaru and helped establish the Tyagaraja Aradhana festival in his memory. Within a male dominated festival, she fought to ensure that women artists were given equal participation. She was among the last practitioners of the devadasi tradition in India. A devadasi was a girl who was dedicated to the worship and service of a deity or a temple for the rest of her life. Devadasis were temple prostitutes. In addition to taking care of the temple and performing rituals, these women also learned and practiced classical Indian artistic traditions, and had high social status. They had children by high officials or priests, who were then also taught the music and dance that were an essential part of temple worship. Nagarathnamma was the first president of the Association of the Devadasis of Madras Presidency. She also edited and published books on poetry and anthologies, and was a linguist who held religious discourses in Kannada, Telego, Tamil and Sanskrit.
- November 3, 1905 – Lois Mailou Jones born, influential African American painter and teacher; she was a Harlem Renaissance artist, and the best known black woman artist outside the U.S. in the 1930s and 1940s. She was North Carolina’s Palmer Memorial Institute Art Department founder and its first chair.
- November 3, 1906 – Julia Boyer Reinstein born, American historian and teacher; she taught in the history department of the University of Buffalo, became the first town historian of Cheektowaga, New York, and a founder and president of the Erie County Historical Federation, made up of local historical societies in the county. Though she was a lesbian, she accepted a proposal of marriage from Dr. Victor Reinstein in 1942, and they were married until his death in 1984. She and her husband donated the property for the Reinstein Woods Nature Preserve, and built the Anna M. Reinstein Library in Cheektowaga. She made donations to Elmira College, her alma mater, toward establishing a Department of Women’s Studies.
- November 3, 1917 – Annapurna Maharana born, Indian pro-independence activist; prominent social reform and women’s rights advocate; a close ally of Mahatma Gandhi.
- November 3, 1918 – Elizabeth Paschel Hoisington born, U.S. Army officer, one of the first two women to attain the rank of brigadier general; director of the Women’s Army Corps (1965-1971).
- November 3, 1919 – Květa Legátová, born Věra Hofmanová, Czech novelist and short story writer, noted for her collection of interconnected short stories in a fictional village, Želary, which one the Czech State Prize for Literature in 2002, which includes her novella, Jozova Hanule (Joza’s Hanule).
- November 3, 1920 – Oodgeroo Noonuccal born Kathleen Walker, Australian Aborigine activist who campaigned for Aboriginal rights, poet, artist and educator; Queensland state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, and a key figure in the campaign to reform the Australian constitution to give Aborigines full citizenship in the Australian Constitution; first Aboriginal Australian to publish a book of verse.
- November 3, 1924 – Violetta Elvin born as Violetta Prokhorova, Russian prima ballerina with the Bolshoi, then at Sadler’s Wells Ballet (now the Royal Ballet) in Great Britain.
- November 3, 1930 – Mable John born, American blues vocalist; first woman signed by Berry Gordy for Motown’s Tamia label.
- November 3, 1935 – Ingrid Rüütel born, Estonian folklorist and philologist; she was Estonia’s First Lady during her husband’s term as President (2001-2006).
- November 3, 1947 – Mazie Hirono born, American Democratic politician; U.S. Congresswoman from Hawaii (2007-2013); U.S. Senator for Hawaii since 2013.
- November 3, 1947 – Siiri Oviir born, Estonian politician and Member of the European Parliament. She had been a prominent member of the Estonian Centre Party until 2012, when she and seven other high-ranking party members left, citing frustration with the lack of openness and transparency of the party’s leaders, and the expulsion of MP Kalle Laanet for his criticism of the leadership.
- November 3, 1949 – Anna Wintour born in England, American journalist and editor; editor-in-chief of Vogue since 1988; one of her former personal assistants, Lauren Weisberger, wrote the 2003 best seller, The Devil Wears Prada. Wintour serves as a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and has organised benefits that have raised $50 million for the museum's Costume Institute.
- November 3, 1953 – Vilma Santos-Recto born, Filipina actress and politician; Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives since 2019; Member of the House for the Batangas 6th District since 2016, where she served on the Committee on Civil Service and Professional Regulation until she was removed by the House leadership because of her rejection of re-imposing capital punishment, and is currently vice chair of the Committee on Globalization; she is the first woman to be Governor of Batangas (2007-2016); and the first woman Mayor of Lipa (1998-2007). In the House, she co-authored the SOGIE Equality bill (Anti-discrimination bill), Magna Carta for Day Care Workers, Maternity Leave Increase bill, Cancer Awareness bill, expanded Senior Citizens bill, and Post-graduate Education for Teachers bill. Before entering politics, she had a long and very successful career as a Filipina film and television star, beginning as a child actress, and was dubbed the “Star for all Seasons.”
- November 3, 1956 – Cathy Jamieson born, Scottish Labour Party politician, MP for Kilmarnock & Loudon (2010-2015); Minister for Justice in the Scottish Executive (2003-2007); Minister for Education and Young People (2002-2003); Deputy Leader of the Scottish Labour Party (2000-2008).
- November 3, 1962 – Jacqui Smith born, British Labour politician; Member of Parliament for Redditch (1997-2010); she served as Britain’s first woman Home Secretary (2007-2009).
- November 3, 1965 – Ann Scott born, French novelist; noted for her 2000 book Superstars, which has gained a cult following.
- November 3, 1970 – Jeanette J. Epps born, American aerospace engineer and NASA astronaut; former Technical Intelligence Officer for the CIA.
- November 3, 1992 – Carol Moseley-Braun becomes the first African-American woman elected as a U.S. Senator, as a Democrat from Illinois (1993-1999), after serving as a Representative for Illinois in the U.S. House (1983-1988).
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- November 4, 1631 – Mary, Princess Royal of England born, became Countess of Nassau, then Princess of Orange, by marriage to Prince William II of Orange, at the age of nine. She was co-regent (1651-1660) for her son William, born shortly after his father’s death, during his minority as Sovereign Prince of Orange. He would become William III of England in 1689, better known as William of Orange. Mary died of smallpox on Christmas Eve in 1660.
- November 4, 1853 – Anna Bayerová born, the second Czech woman medical doctor, but her doctorate was from the University of Bern in 1881, so Czechoslovakia refused to recognize it (the first Czech woman to get a medical degree faced the same problem, but she became a midwife in her hometown); Bayerová set up her medical practice in Bern; in 1889, seven hundred Czech women signed an open letter to her, which appeared in the women’s magazine Ženské Listy, expressing hope that she could return and practice in her homeland.
- November 4, 1897 – Janaki Ammal born, Indian botanist who researched cytogenetics and phytogeography; did notable work on sugarcane and the eggplant; strong supporter of Gandhi and India’s independence; the Ministry of Environment and Forestry of India instituted the Janaki Ammal National Award of Taxonomy in her honor in 2000; the 'Magnolia Kobus Janaki Ammal' is named for her.
- November 4, 1909 – Evelyn Bryan Johnson born, American pilot with the greatest number flying hours of any woman pilot in the world; Colonel in the Civil Air Patrol; after learning to fly in 1944, she logged 57,635.4 flying hours, becoming the oldest flight instructor in the world, training a record number of pilots and giving the most FAA exams; she lived to age 102.
- November 4, 1915 – Marguerite Patten born, English home economist, food writer and broadcaster; during WWII, she worked for the Ministry of Food, giving recipes making use of available rationed food on a BBC programme called The Kitchen Front; debuted her first television cookery show on the BBC in 1947; author of dozens of cookery books, including the first cook book in England with colour illustrations, Cookery in Colour.
- November 4, 1921 – Mary Sherman Morgan born, American rocket fuel scientist and engineer, who invented the liquid fuel Hydyne in 1957, which powered the Jupiter-C rocket.
- November 4, 1924 – Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes first U.S. woman governor, in Wyoming.
- November 4, 1928 – Hannah Weiner born, American poet; part of the New York “happenings” of the 1960s; in later years, she wrote journals about her experiments with automatic writing and her struggles with schizophrenia.
- November 4, 1929 – Shakuntala Devi born, Indian polymath, mental calculator, author of both fiction and non-fiction on mathematics, puzzles, and a sympathetic study of homosexuality in India, considered the first serious work on the subject.
- November 4, 1939 – Gail E. Haley, American children’s book author-illustrator, noted for Madwomen of Meriweather, as well as A Story a Story, winner of the 1971 Caldecott Medal; and The Post Office Cat, which won the 1976 Kate Greenaway Medal.
- November 4, 1940 – Marlène Jobert born in Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, French actress and author who left acting in the late 1970s to concentrate on writing children’s books and books about classical composers, including Mozart, Chopin and Tchaikovsky.
- November 4, 1941 – Lyndall Gordon born, South African-English biographer and academic; senior research fellow at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford; noted for Eliot’s Early Years, which won the British Academy’s 1978 Rose Mary Crawshay Prize; Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life, winner the 1984 James Tait Black Prize for Biography; and Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life, which won the 1994 Cheltentham Prize for Literature.
- November 4, 1942 – Patricia Bath born, American ophthalmologist, inventor and humanitarian; first black person to serve as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University; the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose, and now holds four patents; first woman member of the Jules Stein Eye Institute; first woman to lead a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology, and first woman elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center. In 1976, Bath co-founded the non-profit American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness, and its president.
- November 4, 1948 – Alexis Hunter born in New Zealand, contemporary painter and photographer who worked in London; member of the Women’s Workshop of Artists Union (1972-1975) and the Woman’s Free Arts Alliance; explored the importance of tattoos as cultural art and commentary, and did several series of photographs related to feminist theories, including a photograph in her 1978 How to Make it in a Man’s World series entitled The Marxist Housewife (Still Does the Housework), showing a manicured hand cleaning a poster of Karl Marx, referencing both class issues and Marx’s lack of recognition of domestic labour in his writing.
- November 4, 1958 – Anne Sweeney born, American business executive; co-chair of Disney Media, President of the Disney–ABC Television Group, and the President of Disney Channel (1996-2014); won the Lucy Award from Women in Film in Los Angeles in 2002; inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Hall in 2005.
- November 4, 1960 – Dr. Jane Goodall, at Kasakela Chimpanzee Community in Tanzania, observes chimpanzees creating tools, the first scientifically recorded observation of tool-making in non-humans.
- November 4, 1960 – Kathy Griffin born, American comedian, social commentator who has been frequently in hot water because of her ‘nothing off-limits’ style, actress, and outspoken supporter of LGBT rights; she has also done two USO tours to entertain U.S. troops.
- November 4, 1965 – Lee Ann Roberts Breedlove is the first woman to exceed 300 mph, a record 308.5 mph driving the Spirit of America–Sonic 1, a jet-powered vehicle, on the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.
- November 4, 2012 – Fauzia Yusuf Haji Adan is nominated as Somalia’s first woman Foreign Minister. She is confirmed, and serves in the cabinet both as Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister from 2012 to 2014.
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- November 5, 1607 – Anna Maria van Schurman born, Dutch painter, scholar, engraver and poet; highly educated, proficient in 14 languages, and excelling at art, music and literature; she argued in Dissertatio De Ingenii Muliebris ad Doctrinam, & meliores Litteras aptitudine (The Learned Maid or, Whether a Maid may be a Scholar) in favor of educating women, but not for women to use their education to enter a profession, because she was against allowing it to interfere with their domestic duties.
- November 5, 1834 – Anna Edwards Leonowens born in India, British educator, travel writer and feminist. She was governess (1862-1867) to the children of King Mongkut of Siam; her memoir, The English Governess at the Siamese Court, published in 1870, was the basis for the play on which the 1951 smash-hit Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I was based.
- November 5, 1850 – Ella Wheeler Wilcox born, American author and poet.
- November 5, 1857 – Ida Tarbell born, ground-breaking investigative reporter, wrote exposé on Standard Oil that led to federal investigation and break-up of the company.
- November 5, 1872 – Susan B. Anthony is arrested in New York for casting a ballot (along with 15 other women), testing the limits of the newly ratified 14th Amendment; but her vote is not counted; at the trial, she will be denied the right to take the stand on her own behalf on the grounds of “incompetence,” and fined $100, which she refuses to pay.
- November 5, 1900 – Ethelwynn Trewavas born, British ichthyologist, over a dozen fish species named in her honor.
- November 5, 1911 – Marie Osborne Yeats born, “Baby Marie” the first major child star of American silent films; later worked as a costumer for Western Costume, a major clothing supplier for the motion picture industry.
- November 5, 1917 – Jacqueline Auriol born, French aviator and test pilot, one of the first women to break the sound barrier; she also set five world speed records in the 1950s and 1960s; her autobiography, I Live to Fly, was published in 1970.
- November 5, 1922 – Violet Barclay also used the name Valerie Barclay, American illustrator and pioneering female comic-book artist; her career started as an inker at Timely Comics, which would later become Marvel Comics, doing work that was unsigned and uncredited. In the early 1940s she worked on several successful series, including the career-girl humor series, Nellie the Nurse. She left Timely Comics in 1949, and worked as a freelance artist, but left the field in the mid-1950s during an industry slump, and segued into fashion illustration for national retail chains. She retired with the advent of computer graphics, and by 2004 was painting reproductions of John Singer Sargent portraits. She died in 2010 at the age of 87.
- November 5, 1945 – Aleka Papariga (Αλέκα Παπαρήγα) born, Greek Communist Party politician; Member of the Parliament of Greece for Athens B since 1993; the first woman to head a major political party, the KPP, in Greece (1993-2013).
- November 5, 1945 – Vandana Shiva born, Indian scholar, environmental activist, food sovereignty advocate, and anti-globalization author; noted for her book Vedic Ecology.
- November 5, 1953 – Joyce Maynard born, American novelist and newspaper and magazine journalist; noted for her 1992 novel, To Die For, drawn from the Pamela Smart murder case. When Maynard was 18,
an essay of hers was published in the New York Times, along with a photograph. J.D. Salinger contacted her and urged her to “to leave college, come live with him (have babies, collaborate on plays we would perform together in London’s West End) and be (I truly believed this) his partner forever.” She left her scholarship at Yale and moved in with him. Seven months later, “with words as devastating as they had once been captivating and entrancing, he put two $50 bills in my hand and instructed me to return to New Hampshire, clear my things out of his house and disappear.” In 1998, her decision to write about her experience in the memoir At Home in the World , and to subsequently to sell Salinger’s letters to fund her children’s college fees, brought massive condemnation. She was labelled a “stalker”, an “opportunistic onetime nymphet”, and the author of a “tawdry boudoir confession.”
- November 5, 1958 – Mo Gaffney born, American comedian, writer and activist; co-wrote and starred with Kathy Najimy in two off-Broadway ‘Kathy and Mo’ shows shows, which both won Obie Awards; activist for same-sex marriage.
- November 5, 1962 – Turid Birkeland born, Norwegian Labour Party politician; Norwegian Minister of Culture (1996-1997); Member of Norwegian Parliament (1986-1989); Oslo City Councilwoman in 2015, until her death from complications of myelofibrosis.
- November 5, 1964 – Famke Janssen born, Dutch film and television actress, best known for playing a villain in the Bond film Goldeneye, and as Jean Grey in the first X-Men movie; she made her independent film producer-director and co-writer debut in 2011 with the comedy-drama Bringing Up Bobby, which debut at the Cannes Film Festival. She has aooeared with her dog as part of a PETA campaign for animal rights, was appointed in 2008 as a Goodwill Ambassador for Integrity by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, and has been an outspoken critic of Hollywood’s double-standard age prejudice toward actresses, which often sinks the careers of “leading ladies” in their late thirties or early forties, while many leading men continue to be hired for leading roles well into their sixties.
- November 5, 1973 – Gráinne Seoige born, Irish journalist, news anchor, television presenter and Irish language advocate; she is the only television presenter to have worked on Irish television’s TG4, TV3, RTÉ One and RTÉ2. She has also read the inaugural news bulletins on three separate channels—TG4, TV3, and Sky News Ireland, and also appeared on the BBC One series That’s Britain.
- November 5, 1974 – Ella T. Grasso elected as governor of Connecticut, the first U.S. woman elected as a state governor without succeeding her husband (1975-1980); previously served Connecticut’s 6th District in the U.S. House of Representatives (1971-1975).
- November 5, 1982 – Leah Culver born, computer programmer and co-author of OAuth and oEmbed API specifications; co-founder of the micro-blogging site Pownce in 2007, acquired by Six Apart in 2008; also co-founder of real time chat site Convore in 2011, which pivoted into Grove, a chat service for workgroups, and was sold to Revolution Systems in 2012. After working as an engineer at Dropbox, she co-founded Breaker with Erik Berlin in 2016, where she is currently CTO.
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- November 6, 1856 – Scenes of Clerical Life, three short stories by the author later known as George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), are submitted for publication.
- November 6, 1884 – May Brahe born, Australian composer, best known for songs and ballads, including “Bless This House” (lyrics by Helen Taylor).
- November 6, 1886 – Ida Barney born, American astronomer and mathematician; produced 22 volumes of astrometric measurements on 150,000 stars; worked at the Yale University Observatory as a researcher (1922-1955); awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1952.
- November 6, 1894 – Opal Kunz born, American aviator; first woman pilot to race men in an open competition; chief organizer of the Betsy Ross Air Corps, and charter member of the Ninety-Nines, a women pilots’ organization; during WWI, was a flight instructor for Navy cadets and the Civilian Pilot Training Program.
- November 6, 1900 – Ida Lou Anderson born, pioneer in radio broadcasting, and professor; after graduation from college, she became a professor of speech and drama, a radio station advisor and broadcasting coach. Edward R. Murrow was one of her students, and she became his mentor and advisor. Anderson suggested the opening phrase “This is London” for Murrow’s broadcasts from the city during the Nazi Blitz early in WWII, with the slight pause after “This” which made the phrase so memorable. She died at age 40 of complications from polio which she had suffered as a child.
- November 6, 1917 – New York State adopts a constitutional amendment — women win the right to vote in state elections.
- November 6, 1933 – Else Ackermann born, German physician and pharmacologist who became an East German politician in the Christian Democratic Union party. While chair of the local branch of the party in her hometown of Neuenhagan, she drafted a report on the power relationships between the citizen and the state, and in 1988 she presented what came to be known as the “Neuenhagen Letter,” to the national party, a significant precursor of the 1989 changes leading to the end, in the early summer of 1990, of the one-party dictatorship, followed by German reunification later that same year.
- November 6, 1938 – Diana E. H. Russell born in South Africa, educated in Britain and the U.S.; feminist writer, sociologist and anti-apartheid activist; pioneer in Women’s Studies, offering one of the earliest courses as an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Mills College; organizer of the first International Tribunal on Crimes against Women in Brussels in 1976; advocate for the use of ‘Femicide’ to describe violent murders of women by men because they are female, and adding it as a category to legislation against hate crimes.
- November 6, 1940 – Ruth Messenger born, New York City liberal political leader and advocate for public education, ran unsuccessfully for mayor against incumbent Rudy Giuliani in 1997; president and CEO of American Jewish World Service (1998-2016).
- November 6, 1946 – Sally Field born, American actress and director; Oscar-winner for Best Actress for Norma Rae and Places in the Heart; director and co-author of the TV movie The Christmas Tree (1996), and the feature film Beautiful (2000); advocate for women’s rights and gay rights.
- November 6, 1947 – First show of NBC’s Meet the Press; Martha Rountree, co-creator of Meet the Press, was the first moderator (1947-1953), and the only woman to host the show to date.
- November 6, 1954 – Catherine Crier born, American journalist, author and attorney. Her legal career began in 1978 in the Dallas County District Attorney’s office, where she rose from Assistant District Attorney to Felony Chief Prosecutor (1982-1984). At age thirty, she became the youngest elected state judge in Texas, serving as Texas State District Judge for the 162nd District Court (1984-1990). She switched to television journalism at CNN in 1990, then in 1993 she joined the 20/20 news magazine team at ABC. In 1996, she was at Fox News Channel for The Crier Report, then moved in 1999 to Court TV as an Executive Editor, and host of Catherine Crier Live (1999-2007). As an author, her books include The Case Against Lawyers; Deadly Game; Contempt – How the Right is Wronging American Justice; Final Analysis; and Patriot Acts –What Americans Must Do to Save the Republic.
- November 6, 1955 – Catherine Asaro born; science fiction and fantasy author; former ballet and jazz dancer; PhD in chemical physics from Harvard who privately teaches math, physics, and chemistry to gifted kids; advocate for getting more women in STEM fields; best known for her series Saga of the Skolian Empire.
- November 6, 2015 – A Mormon spokesman confirmed that the new policy of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints declares those in a same-sex marriage are considered apostates, and children living in a same-sex household may not be blessed as babies, or baptized until they are 18, and then only if they disavow same-sex cohabitation and marriage, stop living within the household and request to join the church.
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- November 7, 1867 – Marie Curie born, Polish chemist who did most of her pioneering work in France. First she separated polonium, and then radium a few months later. The quantity of radon in radioactive equilibrium with a gram of radium was named a curie (subsequently redefined as the emission of 3.7 x 1010 alpha particles per second). With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. Later, she also was sole winner of a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. Her family won five Nobel awards in two generations. She died of radiation poisoning from her work before the need for protection was known.
- November 7, 1872 – Leonora von Stosch Speyer, Lady Speyer, born in America, musician and poet, winner of the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Fiddler’s Farewell; she studied music in Brussels, Paris, and Leipzig, and played the violin professionally before her first marriage, which ended in divorce; her second husband was Sir Edgar Speyer, a British banker.
- November 7, 1878 – Lise Meitner born in Austria-Hungary, Austrian-Swedish physicist; co-leader with Otto Hahn of the scientists who discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron, a process which was the basis of the WWII nuclear weapons developed by the U.S. at Los Alamos. She was forced to leave Nazi Germany in 1938, and went to Sweden, bur Meitner refused to work on the atom bomb. In 1966, she shared the Enrico Fermi Award with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann for their joint research which led to uranium fission.
- November 7, 1878 – “Cissy” Eleanor Medill Patterson born, editor and publisher of the Washington Times-Herald; early crusader for home rule for the District of Columbia; novelist, known for Glass Houses and Fall Flight.
- November 7, 1893 – Margaret Leech born, American historian and fiction writer; won the 1942 Pulitzer Prize in History in 1942 for Reveille in Washington, the first woman to win for history, and again in 1960 for In the Days of McKinley, also awarded the Bancroft Prize; married Ralph Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer's son.
- November 7, 1893 – Women in Colorado win the right to vote, the second state in the U.S. where woman suffrage passed, and the first state where it was enact by popular referendum. In 1894, three Republican women – Clara Cressingham, Carrie Clyde Holly and Frances Klock – became the first women to be elected to any U.S. legislature when they were elected to the Colorado House of Representatives. They each served one term (1895-1896). Newspaperwoman Helen Ring Robinson was the first woman Colorado State Senator (1913-1916), and she chaired the Colorado State Senate Education Committee. She traveled the U.S. making speeches in favor of national woman suffrage, and introduced a minimum wage for women bill in Colorado, but it failed to pass.
- November 7, 1900 – Nellie Campobello, born as Maria Moya Luna, Mexican writer and poet who wrote Cartucho, a novel that chronicles the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), one of the few published works to document the revolution from a woman’s perspective; she was also a ballet dancer, choreographer and director of la Escuela Plástica Dinámica (now the Mexican National School of Dance). Among her other works are the novel, Las manos de mama (The Hands of Mama) and Tres poemas (Three Poems). In 1985, Campobello suddenly disappeared, along with her belongings, including paintings by Orozco and Diego Rivera. She had given power of attorney to Claudio Fuentes Figueroa and his wife Maria Cristina Belmont, who took care of her house. Her whereabouts were unknown until 1998, when the Commission of Human Rights of the Federal District ruled that Nellie had died on July 9, 1986, after a death certificate for her was found, and the gravestone on a nameless grave at the Progreso de Obregón Cemetery of Hidalgo was discovered with her initials on it. The death certificate had been witnessed by Claudio Fuentes Figueroa.
- November 7, 1901 – Norah McGuinness born, modern Irish painter and illustrator; she was also a designer for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, then later worked in London and New York, before returning to Ireland in 1939.
- November 7, 1909 – Ruby Hurley born, administrator for the NAACP, setting up and running their first office in the Deep South, in Birmingham AL; she was on the committee that arranged Marian Anderson’s performance at the Lincoln Memorial after she was barred from Constitution Hall; as NAACP Youth Secretary, she increased youth membership to 25,000; Hurley investigated the 1955 Emmitt Till murder in Mississippi despite personal danger.
- November 7, 1915 – M. Athalie Range born in Bahamas, American Civil Rights activist and Florida politician; first black person to serve on the Miami City Commission, first African-American since Reconstruction, and first woman, to head a Florida state agency, Department of Community Affairs.
- November 7, 1916 – Jeannette Rankin becomes the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, from Montana (1917-1919).
- November 7, 1917 – Helen Suzman born, South African politician and anti-Apartheid activist; Member of the South African Parliament for Houghton (1953-1989), where she used every opportunity to speak out against discriminatory legislation and to defend the right of freedom of expression for all South Africans. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party in 1959, and its sole representative in parliament for the next 16 years. She visited prisons to inspect living conditions of prisoners, including those on Robben Island, and met with Nelson Mandela several times. Her reports improved prison conditions for several ANC prisoners, and she used her parliamentary privilege to evade government censorship, and pass information about the worst abuses of apartheid to the media. She was frequently reviled and derided as a Jew and as a woman by other members of Parliament and by Prime Minister P.W. Botha, both in Parliament and in the government-controlled press. Suzman was once accused by a minister of asking questions in parliament that embarrassed South Africa, to which she replied: “It is not my questions that embarrass South Africa; it is your answers.” The UN honored her with its Human Rights Award in 1978, and the Medallion of Heroism in 1980, and she was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
- November 7, 1919 – Ellen Stewart born, influential American theatre director-producer, founder of La MaMa, an experimental theatre company in NYC, which produced the first plays of many new playwrights, including Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, and Harvey Fierstein, and gave actors like Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Bette Midler some of their first roles.
- November 7, 1921 – ‘Lisa Ben’ born as Edythe Eyde, American LGBT rights activist, writer and singer-songwriter; while working as a secretary at RKO Studios in Los Angeles, she became the founder and publisher of the lesbian magazine Vice Versa in 1947, but was forced to stop publishing when she lost her job at RKO in 1948, and her new position left her no opportunity to type the magazine articles at work. In the 1950s, she was a contributor to the Daughters of Bilitis magazine, The Ladder. Noted for her song, “Cruisin’ Down the Boulevard,” one of the first recorded lesbian songs. Inducted into the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Hall of Fame in 2010.
- November 7, 1921 – Susanne Hirzel born, a German music student who became a member of the White Rose, an anti-Nazi resistance group; she was arrested and convicted in 1943 of distributing leaflets, but sentenced to six months in prison, because the prosecution was unable to establish that she had knowledge of the leaflets’ contents; after 1945, she became a cello teacher, and wrote a series of books on cello technique.
- November 7, 1925 – Barbara Wertheimer born, author; We Were There: The Story of Working Women in America; she was a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women.
- November 7, 1926 – Joan Sutherland born, internationally acclaimed Australian-Swiss soprano.
- November 7, 1937 – Mary Daheim born, American journalist, historical romance and mystery author; noted for the Bed & Breakfast series; her first mystery, Just Desserts, was nominated for an Agatha Award.
- November 7, 1941 – Madeline Gins born, American architect, artist and poet; with her husband, artist Shusaku Arakawa, she co-founded the Reversible Destiny Foundation, to support projects built in harmony with their “Mechanism of Meaning” principles, involving the expertise of practitioners from many disciplines to enhance life-extending properties of the building designs; unfortunately, their ideas did not extend their lives - her husband died at 73, and Gins died at 72.
- November 7, 1943 – Joni Mitchell born, Canadian singer-songwriter; winner of nine Grammy awards; regarded as one of the most important and influential women recording artists of the late 20th century.
- November 7, 1943 – Silvia Cartwright born, New Zealand jurist; served on the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, and played a major role in the drafting of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women; presided over the 1988 inquiry into issues relating to treatment of cervical cancer at Auckland’s National Women’s Hospital, known as the Cartwright Inquiry; first woman Chief District Court Judge (1989-1993) and first woman appointed to New Zealand’s High Court (1993); the second woman appointed as New Zealand’s Governor-General (2001-2006); she was one of four women appointed, out of 16 international judges, by Cambodia’s Supreme Council of Magistracy to the Trial Chamber of the Khmer Rouge Tribunal investing war crimes and human rights abuses (2006-2014); appointed to the UN Human Rights Council investigation into war crimes and human rights abuses in Sri Lanka in 2014.
- November 7, 1944 – Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jewish poet; at age 23, she became one of 37 Mandate Palestine paratroopers dropped into Hungary by British Army during WWII to rescue Hungarian Jews about to be deported to Auschwitz; she was arrested near the Hungarian border, imprisoned and tortured, but refused to reveal any details of her mission, and after a pro forma trial, was executed by firing squad on this day. A national heroine of Israel, where her poetry is widely known; Israel Hatzeira headquarters and several streets are named for her.
- November 7, 1947 – Rebecca Eaton born, American television and film producer; best known as the executive producer since 1985 of the PBS Masterpiece series; her productions have been awarded 62 Primetime Emmy Awards,16 Peabody Awards, 6 Golden Globes, and 2 Academy Award nominations.
- November 7, 1953 – Maire Aunaste born, Estonian journalist, television presenter and politician; news reporter for Aktuaalne kaamera (Current camera), the Estonian language daily news program; member of the Riigikogu (Estonian Parliament) since 2015; currently on the Social Affairs Committee and Study Committee to Solve the Demographic Crisis.
- November 7, 1989 – ‘Nadya Tolokno’ born Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Russian conceptual artist and political activist, member of the Anarchist Feminist group Pussy Riot. In August 2012, she was convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" after a performance in Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, and sentenced to two years' imprisonment. In December 2013, she was released early with another Pussy Riot member, Maria Alyokhina, under a newly passed amnesty bill dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the Russian constitution.
- November 7, 1990 – Mary Robinson becomes the Republic of Ireland’s first woman President.
- November 7, 2000 – Hillary Rodham Clinton is elected to the U.S. Senate, as a Democrat for New York State (2001-2009), the first American First Lady to win public office.
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- November 8, 1342 – Julian of Norwich born, English anchoress and mystic; her Revelations of Divine Love is the first theological book in the English language attributed with certainty to a woman; venerated in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, but not beatified by the Roman Catholic church, probably because of her vision of God as being both masculine and feminine.
- November 8, 1543 – Lettice Knollys born, Countess of Essex and Countess of Leicester; a grandniece of Anne Boleyn and close to Elizabeth I since childhood, she became part of the court early. At 17, she married Walter Devereux, who became Earl of Essex, but she became involved with Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester while her husband was in Ireland on military duty. Two years after her husband died in Ireland, Lettice and Robert Dudley, a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, were secretly married. When the queen found out, she banished the Countess from court. When Robert died in 1588, she unexpectedly married Sir Christopher Blount, 12 years younger, and a Catholic, who was one of Dudley’s household officers, but also a secret agent involved in the attempt to put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the English throne. He was beheaded for treason in 1601, as was her son from her first marriage, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who had attempted to force his way into the court with his followers, demanding an audience with Elizabeth, which was declared to be treason. In 1604-1605, Lettice successfully defended her widow’s dower rights in court when her possessions and her good name were threatened by the Earl's illegitimate son, Robert Dudley, who claimed that he was his father's legitimate heir, implicitly declaring her marriage bigamous. She was still walking a mile a day up until she turned 90, and died at age 91 in December 1634.
- November 8, 1710 – Sarah Fielding born, English author; The Governess, or the Little Female Academy, the first novel aimed specifically at children.
- November 8, 1715 – Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel-Bevern born, Queen consort of Prussia (1740-1786); since her husband, Frederick II of Prussia, disliked ceremonial court life and public representation of the royal house, these duties fell more and more to Elisabeth Christine, who handled almost all the visible representation duties, and had a virtually separate court from her husband, where she was hostess to foreign dignitaries and royal birthdays and weddings, as well as sponsoring concerts and dinners, and holding card parties. During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the king was absent from the capital for six years. Elisabeth Christine became the symbol of Prussian resilience in Berlin during the crisis, and she oversaw the evacuation of the royal house and the court when the city was twice threatened with invasion, in 1757 and 1760. Frederick made no attempt to hide his lack of interest in his wife, which made it difficult for her to be treated with the respect her position should have commanded. After his death in 1786, as the Queen Dowager, she continued to be influential in non-political matters at court, and very popular with the people, since hers was the most familiar public face of Prussian royalty, and she was well-known for her many charities, to which she gave over half of her allowance. She was interested in literature, and wrote several works of her own, as well as a translation of Le Chrétien dans la Solitude (The Christian in Solitude), which she published under the pseudonym “Constance.” She introduced silk cultivation to Prussia, and was also a support to the French émigré community in Berlin. She died at the age of 81 in 1797.
- November 8, 1837 – Mary Lyon, American pioneer in women’s education, founds Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which later becomes Mount Holyoke College. The requirements were far more rigorous than any other ladies’ seminary: seven courses in the sciences and mathematics for graduation. She introduced women to "a new and unusual way" to learn science — laboratory experiments which they performed themselves. She organized field trips on which students collected rocks, plants, and specimens for lab work, and inspected geological formations and recently discovered dinosaur tracks. Tuition was kept very low by requiring students to perform many of the housekeeping chores at the school, and they were also required to take a daily vigorous walk after breakfast — 45 minutes in the winter, and an hour in the fall and spring. In spite of a very tough entrance exam, and the controversy over her innovative teaching methods, the school quickly reached its target of 200 students.
- November 8, 1878 – Dorothea Bate born, English paleontologist and pioneer in archaeozoology; studied fossils of extinct mammals to understand how and why giant and dwarf forms evolved; first known woman to be employed as a scientist by the Natural History Museum in London; made many expeditions to Mediterranean Islands and elsewhere to find prehistoric fauna remains.
- November 8, 1892 – Therese Benedek born, pioneer in psychoanalysis, fled Nazi Germany for U.S., and a pioneer in research on female sexuality and in psychosomatic medicine. She was reluctant to leave Germany after the Nazi takeover because, she insisted, “I am not a Jew, I am a Hungarian!” and “I will not go uninvited to another country.” But in 1936, her husband persuaded her to accept Franz Alexander’s invitation to become training analyst of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis. Despite serious language difficulties, Benedek obtained her American medical license in 1937.She played a central role in the development of psychoanalysis in the United States, while serving as supervising analyst and member of the research staff of the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis for thirty-four years. She was president of the Chicago Psychoanalytic Society (1958-1959). Benedek is best known for Psychosexual Functions in Women, dealing with the emotional response of women to the fluctuations of hormones during the sexual cycle, published in 1952. Much of her research on parenthood, family life, and depression was completed in her seventies. After her retirement in 1969, she maintained a private practice, although by then her hearing was impaired and she had difficulty walking. In 1972, for her eightieth birthday, the Therese Benedek Research Foundation was established in her honor.
- November 8, 1897 – Dorothy Day born, American journalist, social reformer, suffragist and peace activist. In 1917, she was imprisoned as a member of suffragist Alice Paul’s nonviolent Silent Sentinels who took shifts out in front of the White House, six days a week for two-and-a-half years, carrying signs calling for woman suffrage. Day became a Catholic convert in 1927, and was co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s, and editor of The Catholic Worker newspaper.
- November 8, 1900 – Margaret Mitchell born, American author of Gone With the Wind.
- November 8, 1908 – Martha Gellhorn born, journalist, war correspondent and author; one of two little girls representing “future voters” at a demonstration for woman’s suffrage at the 1916 national Democratic convention in St. Louis; went to Europe in 1930, worked as a foreign correspondent for the United Press Paris bureau; returned to the U.S., worked with photographer Dorothea Lange for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, documenting hungry and homeless people; went with Ernest Hemingway to Barcelona in 1937 to cover the Spanish Civil War, then reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany; covered WWII from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore to England; posed as a male stretcher bearer to cover D-Day, the only woman to land at Normandy; one of the journalists who covered the liberation of Dachau; her four-year marriage to Hemingway ended in divorce in 1945, in part because of conflict over her career; worked for Atlantic Monthly,covered the Vietnam War, the Arab-Israel conflicts and civil wars in Central America; retired in 1995 at the age of 87 because of failing eyesight; The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism was created in her honor in 1999.
- November 8, 1910 – Washington state passes a constitutional amendment to guarantee woman suffrage.
- November 8, 1920 – Esther Rolle born, black American actress, founding member of the renowned Negro Ensemble Company; best known for playing Florida Evans on Maude (1972–1974), and starring in Good Times (1974–1979). She was also a very savvy investor.
- November 8, 1920 – Sitara Devi born, Indian singer, dancer and choreographer of the classical Kathak form of dance, raised in the tradition by her parents, which was a scandal at the time because Kathak dancing had declined into dancing done by nautch girls and boys. Her father persisted in reviving the ancient form, and re-connecting Kathak with its roots in religious ceremonies. She resisted an arranged marriage proposed when she was 8 years old, wanting to continue her education. While attending Kamachhagrh High School, she was cast as the leading dancer in a dance drama, and also taught the steps to the other student performers. The performance was acclaimed in the local papers, and led to her solo performances, which brought her to the attention of the Rabindranath Tagore, a highly influential figure in the Bengali literature and music. He dubbed her Nritya Samragni (empress of dance), and she was recruited by Niranjan Sharma, a filmmaker and dance director to perform dance sequences in many Hindi movies, but gave up cinema performing in 1957 to concentrate on classical dance forms, while also doing some study of Russian ballet. Devi taught Kathak dancing to several Bollywood celebrities, and had begun work on compiling the research done by her father on the traditions of classical dance shortly before her final illness, but did not complete the book she was planning before her death in 2014.
- November 8, 1922 – Thea Drell Hodge born, American computer scientist, a pioneer in the field; founded the Minnesota chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, and mentored countless young women in computer science; member of the Association for Computing Machinery, which inducted her into their hall of fame in 2004.
- November 8, 1926 – Darleane C. Hoffman born, American nuclear chemist; in the 1950s she applied for a position with the Los Alamos National Laboratory radiochemistry group, but was told, "We don't hire women in that division." She persisted, and was hired by an enlightened male group leader, becoming a division leader of the isotope and nuclear chemistry division, the first woman to head a scientific division there; senior faculty scientist in the Nuclear Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; one of the researchers who confirmed the existence of Seaborgium, element 106; won the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1997, and the Priestly Medal in 2000, only the second woman to win the Priestley, after Mary L. Good in 1997).
- November 8, 1947 – Margaret Rhea Seddon born, American physician, researcher on the effects of radiation therapy on nutrition in cancer patients, and NASA astronaut (1979-1997); she was the seventh woman in space, and flew on missions in 1985, 1991 and 1993; currently assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group in Nashville, Tennessee.
- November 8, 1951 – Dame Laura M. Cox born, English, Queen’s Bench High Court judge (2002-2016). In 2018, she was appointed to lead an independent inquiry into allegations of bullying and sexual harassment of House of Commons staff.
- November 8, 1952 – Alfre Woodard born, African-American actress, producer and political activist; four-time Emmy winner. She began her career in theatre. After her break-through role in the 1977 Off-Broadway production of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, she made her film debut in a small role in the 1978 film, Remember My Name. She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 1983 for Cross Creek. Woodard is a founder and board member of Artists for a New South Africa, which has raided over $9 million USD to provide healthcare for South African AIDS orphans. She is an active member of the Democratic Party, and supported Barack Obama in his run for president and for re-election. She is a supporter of LGBT rights and same-sex marriage.
- November 8, 1978 – Emma Lewell-Black born, British Labour politician, Member of Parliament for South Shields since 2013, the first women to represent South Shields; member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee since 2013, and of the Work and Pensions Select Committee since 2015.
- November 8, 1983 – Danielle Evans born, American fiction writer; her first short story collection won the 2011 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize.
- November 8, 1984 – Dr. Anna L. Fisher, physician on NASA shuttle Discovery, becomes 3rd American woman in space — and first Mom in space — there were six stars on the crew patch, five for the crew, and one more for her daughter.
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- November 9, 1723 – Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia born, became Princess Abbess of Quedlinburg (1756-1787); noted as a musical patron, and a collector of music whose library included over 600 volumes of works by Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, among many others; she was herself a composer of chamber works, but many of them have been lost.
- November 9, 1732 – Julie de Lespinasse born, Frenchwoman who hosted an influential Salon during the Enlightenment; also noted for her love letters, published over 30 years after her death, first to the Marquis de Mora, son of the Spanish Ambassador to France, who died in 1774 from tuberculosis, and then to the Comte de Guibert, whose marriage to another woman led to her downward spiral into depression and opium addiction, and death at 43.
- November 9, 1854 – Maud Howe Elliott born, American writer, co-author with her sister of a biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe, which won the 1917 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, first year prize given in this category. She was a founding member of the Progressive Party and a participant in the woman suffrage movement. Howe was also a founder of the Newport Art Association in Rhode Island, and its secretary (1912-1942).
- November 9, 1871 – Florence R. Sabin born, American anatomist; pioneering woman in medical science; first female full professor at John Hopkins School of Medicine; first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences; first female department head at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research; Chaired the Colorado Governors’ Committee on Health, spear-heading campaign to pass health reform laws, named the ‘Sabin Health Laws’ in her honor, which drastically reduced tuberculosis cases in the state, expanded and improved hospital care, and became a blueprint for health reform in other states.
- November 9, 1891 – Louisa E. Rhine born, American doctor of botany, who was initially a research fellow in plant physiology, but became the foremost researcher of spontaneous psychic experiences. After she and her husband, J.B. Rhine, trained with Dr. Walter Franklin Prince of the Boston Society (1926-1927), then moved to Durham, North Carolina, where her husband helped launch Duke University’s parapsychology department. She stopped working in 1928 to raise their adopted son, and was co-founder of the Durham Nursery School, the first nursery school in South Carolina for children of working women, and also helped form the Durham Chapter of the League of Women Voters. In 1948, she returned to academic research, where she took over reading and answering letters from the public about the Duke parapsychology lab, at first part-time, but later she began full-time work researching and analyzing thousands of experiences from letters sent to her, and laying the groundwork for their classification.
- November 9, 1905 – Erika Mann born, German anti-Nazi writer who moved to Switzerland in 1933, then in 1935 entered a marriage of convenience with W.H. Auden to obtain a British passport after her German citizenship was rescinded by the Nazis; her 1938 book, School for Barbarians, criticized the Nazi education system; she worked for the BBC during WWII, broadcasting in German, and after D-Day was a war correspondent traveling with the Allied forces, and also covered the Nuremberg trials. After the war, she moved to the U.S., but was branded a Communist by the McCarthy witch hunt, and moved back to Switzerland.
- November 9, 1914 – Hedy Lamarr born in Austria, Hollywood film star, and co-inventor with composer George Antheil of a radio guidance system using spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology that was twenty years ahead of the time, and became the basis for modern Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology.
- November 9, 1916 – Martha Settle Putney born, American lieutenant and historian who served as one of the first black members of the WWII Women’s Army Corps, and chronicled the history of African Americans in the U.S. armed forces.
- November 9, 1918 – Florence Chadwick born, legendary female long distance swimmer, swam English channel in 1950, beating the existing record by 71 minutes.
- November 9, 1922 - Dorothy Dandridge born, the first black American to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress, for her performance in the 1954 film Carmen Jones.
- November 9, 1923 – Elizabeth Hawley born, American journalist, and chronicler of Himalayan expeditions since the early 1960s. Even though she never climbed a mountain, she is respected by the international mountaineering community for her accurate and detailed records; Peak Hawley in Nepal is named for her.
- November 9, 1928 – Anne Sexton born, American poet; winner of the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Live or Die; co-authored four children’s books with poet Maxine Kumin. She had a long battle with severe bipolar disorder. Her last poetry collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God, was published after her 1974 suicide.
- November 9, 1936 – Mary Travers born, singer-songwriter of Peter, Paul and Mary
- November 9, 1938 – Ti-Grace Atkinson born, American radical feminist, early member of National Organization for Women, but left over disputes about abortion and marriage inequalities; founder of The Feminists (1968-1973), advocate of political lesbianism; author of Amazon Odyssey
- November 9, 1946 – Dame Marina Warner born, British novelist and historian whose non-fiction works frequently relate to feminism and myth; first woman elected president of the Royal Society of Literature since its founding in 1820.
- November 9, 1948 – Jane Humphries born, American-British Professor of Economic History and Fellow of All Souls College at the University of Oxford; her field is economic growth and development and the industrial revolution; Gender and Economics, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution.
- November 9, 1960 – Sara Franklin born, American anthropologist, who combines ethnographic methods and kinship theory with fieldwork on IVF, cloning, embryology and stem cell research, as well as leading major research studies addressing the cultural and social dimensions of new reproductive and genetic technologies; among the first researchers to analyse the forms of social change associated with the introduction of new reproductive technologies in the 1980s.
- November 9, 1961 – Jill Dando born, English journalist, newsreader, and presenter of the BBC programme Crimewatch; after working as a print journalist (1980-1985), she worked in regional BBC television (1985-1988), then moved to national television news on BBC1 and BBC2 (1986-1995) before moving to presenting Crimewatch in 1995, and also did episodes of other programmes. She was shot to death on April 26, 1999, outside her home. A local man was convicted and imprisoned for the murder, but was later acquitted after an appeal and retrial. The case remains open.
- November 9, 2016 – Hillary Clinton wins the popular vote by 2,864,974 votes, but loses her bid to become the first woman U.S. president to Donald Trump in the Electoral College vote, 227-304.
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- November 10, 1620 – Ninon de l'Enclos born, French author, freethinker and arts patron; her salon attracted the literati of Paris, including a young Molière; she had a series of love affairs with prominent and wealthy men, but they did not support her, she supported herself; however, her lack of discretion and outspoken opinions on religion got her in trouble, and she was imprisoned in the Madelonnettes Convent in 1656, but released when Queen Christina of Sweden interceded on her behalf; in her will, she left money for the 9-year-old son of her accountant so he could buy books – he grew up to be known as Voltaire.
- November 10, 1779 – Ann-Marie Javouhey born, French founder of the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny, to educate children, and later to found missions around the world. She is noted for her work in French Guiana, establishing a leper colony there, and her efforts to prepare the African slaves in Guiana for emancipation in 1835. There are now close to 3,000 nuns in the order, serving in over 60 countries. Ann-Marie Javouhey was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1950.
- November 10, 1874 – Idabelle Smith Firestone born, American composer and songwriter; “If I Could Tell You.”
- November 10, 1884 – Zofia Nałkowska born, Polish novelist, dramatist, and essayist; executive member of the Polish Academy of Literature (1933-1939); known for Medaliony (Medallions), a collection of eight stories published in Warsaw in 1946 describing the fate of people who survived the Nazi persecution, based on materials she collected while working at the Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland.
- November 10, 1887 – Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu born, Romanian who was one of the first female engineers; at the Geological Institute of Romania, she started as an assistant, but later led several geology laboratories and participated in various field studies, including some that identified new resources of coal, shale, natural gas, chromium, bauxite and copper. She also taught physics and chemistry.
- November 10, 1891 – In Boston, the first Woman's Christian Temperance Union meeting is held.
- November 10, 1899 – Kate Seredy born in Hungary, Hungarian-American children’s book author and illustrator; she wrote most of her books in English, which was not her first language; noted for The Good Master, a 1936 Newbery Honor Book; The White Stag, winner of the 1938 Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award; and The Singing Tree, a 1940 Newbery Honor Book.
- November 10, 1908 – Noemi Gerstein born, Argentine sculptor, illustrator and plastic artist; won the 1982 Konex Foundation Platinum Award, known for non-figurative sculpture.
- November 10, 1911 – California Proposition 4, the most elaborate campaign ever mounted for woman suffrage, succeeds by just 3,587 votes.
- November 10, 1929 – Marilyn Bergman born, lyricist and songwriter with her husband-partner Alan Bergman; they they have two Academy Awards for Best Song, for the lyrics of “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind.” They were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1980.
- November 10, 1931 – Lilly Pulitzer born, American fashion designer, known for bright prints and warm-weather clothing.
- November 10, 1950 – Debra Hill born, American film producer and screenwriter whose best-known films are in the horror and action genres; The Fog, Halloween II and Halloween III.
- November 10, 1957 – Maria Grazia Spillantini born, Italian molecular neurologist; lecturer on molecular neurology at the University of Cambridge; research work on mechanisms that cause Alzheimer’s Parkinson’s and dementia; member of the Royal Society; won the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Research in 2000.
- November 10, 1958 – Deborah Cameron born, British linguist, professor in Language and Communication at Worcester College, Oxford; her interests are in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and the relationship of language to gender and sexuality; author of Verbal hygiene, and The Myth of Mars And Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?
- November 10, 1960 – Maeve Sherlock born, Baroness Sherlock, British Labour Party Life Peer; Member of the House of Lords since 2010; Commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (2007-2010); Chief Executive of the Refugee Council (2003-2006).
- November 10, 1971 – Holly Black born, American author and editor; noted for her children’s fantasy series, The Spiderwick Chronicles and the Modern Faerie Tales trilogy.
- November 10, 1971 – Nikki Karimi born, Iranian director, screenwriter and actress; best known for writing and directing To Have or Not to Have, and as director of One Night, screened at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard section.
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Sources
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